Babies Online - The Blog

German mom abandons 3 starving children in Italian pizza parlor

What would you do if you were in a foreign country with a broken-down car, with three hungry little kids and you were completely broke?

This German mom and her boyfriend took her three kids to a pizza parlor, ordered something and then “stepped out for a smoke” and never came back. The kids were a 6-year old boy, a 4-year old girl, and an 8-month old baby.

When I first read about the incident in the newspaper, I was really shocked and indignant how a mom could abandon her children like that. After the 26-year old mom and her boyfriend were finally found by the police and explained the reason for her actions, then I got to thinking, maybe she wasn’t such a bad mom after all. It has probably been a terrible ordeal for her to take care of her children after her husband was imprisoned for fatally shaking their 4th child. The reason they were in Italy was the fact that her current boyfriend has broken his parole and was wanted by the German police. That the boyfriend tried to commit suicide while in prison in Italy indicates that the situation is more complex than it seems.

In the meantime, the children have been handed over by Italian officials to German social services officials and their maternal grandparents who traveled to Italy to fetch the children.

But what would you do if you were in a similar situation as the mom? What would you do if you were in a foreign country without any money and your children are starving? Do you think she did the right thing in abandoning her children like that?